Originally trained as an electrical engineer, Andy Kirkham specialized in power generation, transmission, automation, imaging and the black arts of analogue design. During the fifteen years he spent as a Hardware/Software Engineer designing high speed machine vision systems and process control equipment, he developed skills in C, assembler, VHDL and CISC/RISC technologies and many other hardware related techniques. In 1998 he founded his own UK-based ISP company and began working with Unix, MySQL, PHP and contributing to the open source FreeBSD project. Andy sold the company in 2000 and worked as a consultant while continuing to develop LAMP based websites.

Andy (known as "ajk" in Drupal circles) is currently a Drupal.org CVS Contributions repository manager/site maintainer and also a member of the Drupal security team.